Sometimes It's Good To Plan

If you’ve followed me for any amount of time, you’ll be aware that I’m great at talking the talk about my books but then somewhere along the line I disappear and go quiet.

The reason for this?

I’m fantastic at making lists and planning what I’ll next be releasing, what I’ll do to market my next releases, when I’ll be releasing the next book… the list very literally goes on and on.

And then I don’t stick to it, because I’m shit.

No actually, I’m not shit, I’m just very good and making lists and then not sticking to them.

Case in point, 2024.

Around this time last year I made the big list: What I’ll be releasing and hope to achieve in 2024. I can’t find that list now but I know what was on it.

Back in 2022 I had a sort of mini-breakdown regarding my books and writing (a link to the YouTube video I did describing my plans back then is HERE). I was completely overwhelmed, I had two pen names, five series between those pen names, and around sixteen or seventeen books which fit into said series under said pen names, and I was stuck.  I knew I needed to market my books to sell them, I knew which books I needed to market (the first in the series, that’s just the way numbers work) but I just wasn’t and so I decided to remove all of my titles from Amazon and start again, re-editing, new covers, re-launching each book so that by the end of the 2023 I’d have all my books back up and that overwhelm would be gone. This was the plan.

But the thing about a year is that it soon flies by when you’re trying to launch 17 books, and by end of 2023 I’d actually launched 4 books (5 if you count the first trilogy boxset) for just Rob Radcliffe, and hadn’t even touched the 4 books waiting for R.J Radcliffe.

So that list I made had been dutifully ignored, because I’m dead good at making lists and then doing nothing with them when it concerns my writing and books.

And so this time last year, I made a list for 2024, and I can show you what that looked like because I got all posh and turned my launching schedules into Marvel like phase schedules.

Pretty cool hey?

My 2024 publishing plan was set in stone, I’d done an info-graphic, nothing could go wrong.

Of the 14 titles between both pen names, 10 of them were already written and just needed a read over, and I had plenty of time to finish off the other 4, two of them being novellas and the other two novels around 50k words from completion for both of them.

I was on a roll!

Nothing could go wrong!

Oh, hold on a minute, I’m shit, remember?

This year, of the Rob Radcliffe titles I planned to launch, I have only launched the first one (The Other Side). Granted, it took a little longer than expected to finish writing it once I found a gaping big plothole in the story, but that’s what you get when you take 5 years to complete a novel.

R.J Radcliffe was a little more productive. Under that pen name I launched three of the five planned books. The “Coming Soon” marker was going to be a special edition version of the first book in the series, and the December launch will now go out in June of next year because I’ve not finished writing it.

Like I said. I’m great at making lists, but I just don’t plan timeframes realistically enough.

I always like to keep myself busy.

Not just with my own books, I also help new authors set up their own platforms, I design websites, design covers, format books, plan much more successful launches for their books that don’t come and go without any action taken. The author services side of my publishing business is great, but it keeps me away from focusing on my own scribbles which means I can’t release all those books in a year, even when I’ve made a Marvel style launch info-graphic.

Looking forward to 2025, I plan to be more realistic, and in doing so will find the list gets ticked off instead of ignored and then forgotten, or hidden.

To kick off 2025, I’m extremely happy and excited to announce I’ll be co-hosting an Author podcast called Indie Author Roadmap with the amazing, totally more organized Rachel Morton.

We go live with that on 27th December 2024, and it’s going to be great. It is an extension of what I’ve been doing helping new authors for the last few years, and the list for that project is almost up to date.

Then there’s my own books…and this is where I pause to make a couple of new info-graphics.

An hour later and I’m still playing around on Photoshop because I decided to design a cover too.

Before you roll your eyes and say, “fuck sakes Rob, that’s 17 book launches this time,” I’ve thought this through, and of those 17 books, the first eight months of 2025 for Rob Radcliffe are already written. This gives me until October to write Millionaire Maker which is a 25-30k novella, and until December to write a Christmas lad-lit novel (which I have already started and will be around 70k in words). That’s 100k words I need to write for Rob Radcliffe because these books are on the info-graphic and therefore set in graphical stone.

Equally, R.J Radcliffe will be releasing a special edition hardback version of Guardian, book 1 in the Divine Chronicles which is already written, then a novella 25k words for Easter, the fifth Divine Novel in June (which I’m half way through and will be around 85k), book 1 in a new series in August (another 80k which I’ve written the first 15k of), and then three more 25k novellas which are to be released on July 4th, then on Halloween, and finally for the year the last 25k novella on bonfire night.

All in all that’s around 300k words I need to write in the next year.

Maths suggests that’s around 821.91781 words a day, but let’s live dangerously and round it up to 822 words. That’s an hour at my typing speed a day. I’m already averaging two hours a day. 

One thing that has always been missing from my lists I’m really good at ignoring, is accountability. If I ignore them then nothing happens, I answer to no one.

Next year I’ll be co-hosting a podcast with fellow author, Rachel Morton, and she is a scribbling powerhouse. She’ll be asking me every week on the podcast how I’m getting on as I will her, so all of a sudden I’ll have a shit ton of accountability both from my co-host and from our listeners.

In other words, even without any lists or marvel style infographics, 2025 is going to be the year I’ll get my arse in gear whether I like it or not.

And I've just realized that by writing this post and including my Marvel style info-graphics, that I can't do any cover reveals throughout the year because I've just done them all at once now.

I did mention I was shit though.

For me, having a plan and putting it out there so I'm accountable is more important than silly cover reveals.